Drives (or PCs, really) have supported CDDA-out (I think it's called) via IDE forever, definitely makes more sense than a silly seperate cable for audio. (..in the PC world, at least, where everyone has tons of processor time to blow decoding PCM.) I imagine it'd be cheaper to make a CD drive that didn't need to decode audio itself and have a preamp and all that stuff.
Or maybe that batch of drives was just screwy and they sold them anyway.
